The Holocaust

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The Holocaust
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Definition

• Systematic, bureaucratic annihilation of six
  million Jews by the Nazi regime and their
  collaborators as a central act of state during
  World War II
• 1933 nine million Jews lived in the 21 countries
  of Europe later occupied by Germany
• By 1945 two out of every three European Jews had
  been killed.

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Deaths

• An estimated 5 to 6 million Jews, including 3
  million Polish Jews
• 1.8 1.9 million Christian Poles and other
  (non-Jewish) Poles (estimate includes civilians
  killed as due to Nazi aggression and occupation
  but not military casualties of Nazi aggression or
  victims of the Soviet occupation of eastern
  Poland and of deportations to Central Asia and
  Siberia)
• 200,000800,000 Roma Sinti (Gypsies)
• 200,000300,000 people with disabilities
• 80,000-200,000 European Freemasons
• 100,000 communists
• 10,00025,000 homosexual men
• 2,5005,000 Jehovah's Witnesses

Roma people in concentration camp
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Phase I 1933-1939

• 1933 Nazis began to put into practice their
  racial ideology
• Nazis believed that the Germans were racially
  superior
• Struggle for survival between them and inferior
  races.
• Nazis considered themselves the pure German
  (Aryan) Race
• Jews numbered around 500,000 in Germany
• Nazis blamed Jews for Germanys economic
  depression and the WW1 defeat

Dachau concentration camp, outside Munich
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Phase I 1933-1939

• 1933 new German laws forced Jews to quit civil
  service jobs, university and law court positions,
  and other areas of public life.
• 1933 Concentration camps started to remove
  undesired people from society
• 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripped German Jews of
  their citizenship
• 1937 and 1939 Jews banned from public schools,
  theaters, cinemas, resorts, and some cities.
• Seized Jewish businesses and properties or forced
  Jews to sell them at low prices.
• 1938 Kristallnact destroyed synagogues and
  Jewish stores arrests, destroyed homes, murders

The Warsaw Ghetto
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Phase II 1939-1945

• About half the German Jewish population had fled
• On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland and
  World War II began.
• Holocaust shifted to the Final Solution of
  exterminating European Jewry
• Between 1942 and 1944, Nazis eliminated the
  ghettos in occupied Poland
• Concentration camps became Extermination camps
  mostly in Poland.
• Victims arrived in railroad freight cars to gas
  chambers, disguised as showers
• May 1945, Nazi Germany collapsed

Auschwitz
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Extermination Camps

• Most victims came from central Europe 5m
• Victims came from what today are 35 countries
• After 1942, gas became most efficient killer in
  camps
• Nazi doctors conducted experiments on prisoners
  (Dr. Mengele in Auschwitz and Birkenau)

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Opposition to Holocaust

• Some German and occupied peoples worked against
  the Holocaust
• Raul Wallenberg Swedish diplomat in Budapest
• Provided safe passage to tens of thousands of
  Jews from Hungary by providing diplomatic passes
• Arrested by Soviet forces the day before
  liberation of Pest, perhaps suspecting him as
  American spy later died in Soviet prison